SC13 Approaches: Penguin Computing Launches HPC Appliance

With the SC13 Supercomputing Conference coming up next week in Denver, Penguin launches a HPC appliance, NVIDIA releases CUDA6 for simplifying Parallel Computing, and AMD introduces a 12GB supercomputing server graphics card.

Penguin introduces HPC Appliance: Penguin Computing announced the immediate availability of Scyld HCA, its new HPC Cloud Appliance. This appliance turns any HPC Linux cluster into a fully managed HPC hybrid cloud environment, which adds the ease of use and automation of a public cloud to an existing HPC cluster and has the added benefit of seamless hybrid access to Penguin Computing on Demand (“POD”) to support burst out compute and storage capability.  As an integrated software, hardware and managed service Scyld is built on open standards including OpenStack and Ceph. Scyld HCA provides virtual login host lifecycle management, object and data storage, user and group administration, metering and reporting, authentication, a Web-based portal, and an interactive Web GUI for hardware and workflow management. “We are looking forward to the release of Penguin’s Scyld HCA to deliver our vision of a ‘Research Cloud’ for the university,” said Jason Byars, Senior Research Specialist at University of New Mexico. “A turn-key high-performance computing cloud solution like this, supported and maintained by Penguin Computing, means that we can focus on solving pressing bioinformatics problems that our colleagues require without worrying about managing the computing infrastructure.”

NVIDIA simplifies Parallel Computing with CUDA6: NVIDIA (NVDA) announced NVIDIA CUDA 6, the latest version of its pervasive parallel computing platform and programming model. CUDA6 has new performance enhancements that enable developers to instantly accelerate applications up to 8 times, by simply replacing existing CPU-based libraries. Key features include unified memory, drop-in libraries and multi-GPU scaling. "Our technologies have helped major studios, game developers and animators create visually stunning 3D animations and effects," said Paul Doyle, CEO at Fabric Engine, Inc. "They have been urging us to add support for acceleration on NVIDIA GPUs, but memory management proved too difficult a challenge when dealing with the complex use cases in production. With Unified Memory, this is handled automatically, allowing the Fabric compiler to target NVIDIA GPUs and enabling our customers to run their applications up to 10X faster." Version 6 of the CUDA Toolkit is expected to be available in early 2014.

AMD introduces FirePro S10000: AMD announced the new AMD FirePro S10000 12GB Edition graphics card, designed for big data high-performance computing (HPC) workloads for single precision and double precision performance.  With full support for PCI Express 3.0 and optimized for use with the OpenCL compute programming language, the AMD FirePro S10000 12GB Edition GPU features ECC memory plus DirectGMA support allowing developers working with large models and assemblies to take advantage of the massively parallel processing capabilities of AMD GPUs based on the latest AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. "AMD is proving again to be a key player in providing outstanding 3D graphics and GPGPU compute solutions based on the OpenCL Khronos Group standard for the industry with the announcement of the new AMD FirePro S10000 12GB graphics card," said Nicolas Duny, VP R&D Technologies, Dassault Systèmes. "AMD is an industry innovator by responding to our customers' needs with cutting edge technology. The AMD FirePro S10000 12GB card will be a welcome addition to the market and to our customers."